Each day I get between three and five unsolicited emails from staffing firms who have spotted that I have "DevOps" in my LinkedIn profile or Dice/Indeed/etc. resume, and who are trying to fill a "DevOps coach" position.
But when I ask a few questions, I realize that they are really trying to fine a team coach, and really they just want what I would call a "tool jockey". There are lots of people who have learned some of the tools that are associated with DevOps today - AWS EC2 and S3 or maybe Azure or GCE, Chef or Puppet, Docker, maybe Lambda, and know a scripting language or two.
That's not a DevOps coach.
A coach is an expert. It is not someone who is new to this stuff, and it is someone who has used a range of tools, so that they are more than a one trick pony. They have also been around since before DevOps - long before - so that they have perspective and remember why DevOps came about. Otherwise, they don't really understand the problem that DevOps is trying to solve.
In a shift to continuous delivery and other DevOps practices, it is absolutely essential to have an experienced person guiding it. There are too many ways to get into serious trouble. I have seen things completely collapse from the weight of bad decisions, in the form of unmaintainable and brittle automation.
If you need tool engineers, hire them. But don't call them DevOps coaches. Get a real DevOps coach.
A very important reality is this: Very smart people just out of college who know the latest tools can rapidly create a mountain of unmaintainable code and "paint you into a corner" so that there is no way out.
The choices that are made are very important. Should we use a cloud framework? Should we eliminate our middle tier? Should we use Ruby, Java, or Javascript for out back end? Should we have a DevOps team? Should we have a QA function? How should Security work with our teams? Should teams manage their own environments and deployments? Should they support their own apps? Should we have project managers? - it goes on and on.
A tool jockey will not know where to even start with these questions. An experienced DevOps coach will.
